Delusion in Death

“Who ID’d the body?”

“It’s going to take longer to—”

“Gunshot to the face,” Teasdale stated, reading her PPC. “Both William and Gina MacMillon were identified by a neighbor, an Anna Blicks, who died of natural causes in 2048.”

“Face blown away. Your neighbor IDs by body type, hair, clothes, jewelry, and because you’re in the house, because who the fuck else would you be? Goddamn it. She started him up. That was the trigger. Not finding out about the grandfather, not initially. But the grandmother.”

“Why would she fake her own death?” Peabody demanded.

“Let me think. Let me think. Put extra guards on Callaway. Now!”

“Menzini might have arranged it,” Teasdale considered. “He wanted her and the child back, located her, killed someone in her place so no one would look for her.”

“No. No. Women didn’t matter that much. The kid—she’s his blood, and part of the new world order, part of the new beginning. But not the mother. She did it. She went home for something, under Menzini’s orders, had to convince her husband she was contrite—or she’d been brainwashed, abused. She’s terrified, and there’s this baby. He opens the door.”

“For all those months?” Teasdale began.

“Menzini needed someone on the outside, someone who could funnel him money, supplies, information. How the hell do I know, I wasn’t there. Isn’t that how it works—moles, sleepers, double fucking agents?”

She bulled off the elevator, tore toward EDD.

“In the lab, Dallas.” Fast on his feet, McNab passed her, led the way.

She spotted Feeney through the glass, pacing, his hair in wild silver and gray wires, and Callendar, her face grim in contrast to the sassy butt wiggle she performed in front of a swipe screen.

She didn’t see Roarke until she’d pushed through the doors behind McNab. He huddled at a comp station, working manually and by voice. The muttered Irish curses she caught meant he battled the work.

“I’m sorry, Lieutenant.” Callendar broke off the work and wiggle. “If I’d been faster—”

“Forget that. Run it through.”

“Once we broke the code, I took the journal entries. I was taking my time because … we had him. The first bit was just long, rambling bullshit about how he was special, different, important. It was just full of the E and the Go, and how now he knew why he’d always known it. Then he started talking about the grandmother. She set up a meeting, posing as a client, St. Regis Hotel bar. You should read it for yourself, Dallas.”

She ordered the segment on screen.

She was beautiful for a woman of her age. A strong face with piercing blue eyes. Her jewelry was understated, but good. I could see she was a woman of means and taste. She ordered a martini, and it suited her. I admit I found her fascinating even before I knew the truth. She kept her voice, strong like her face, low and intimate. I had to lean toward her to hear.

She asked me what I knew about my heritage. It seemed a strange question, but clients often ask strange questions, and she was picking up the tab. I told her of my grandfather—the war hero bit always impresses. How he and my grandmother had left England for America with my mother to start a new life.

Before I could begin on my parents—I always embellish there as they’re tedious, ordinary people in reality—she told me everything I knew was a lie.

She told me her name—Gina MacMillon—not the name she’d given me to arrange the meeting. I had some vague recollection of that name, but didn’t, right away, connect it to the woman I’d been told was my great-aunt who died in the Urbans.

She, this woman with the compelling eyes, told me she was my true grandmother. That my grandfather had been a great man. Not the soldier who’d done no more than follow the orders of other men, but a great man. A visionary, a leader, and a martyr.

I shouldn’t have believed her, but I did. It explained so much. She and this great man had worked together, fought together, had been lovers. The child they’d created, my mother, had been stolen, and she herself, taken and kept prisoner by her former husband. She’d tried to escape, many times, with the child. Eventually, her captor beat her, left her for dead. Though she tried to find her way back to the child, back to my grandfather, the world was in pieces. She learned the government had captured my grandfather, and she had no choice but to go into hiding.

With a new name and identity, she’d struggled to survive. Eventually she’d married, and well, and used the resources gained there to try to find the child stolen from her. Years of searching led her to me. She understood now the daughter was lost to her. Women were weak—most women—but her grandson, so like the man she’d loved, was found.

I asked what she wanted from me. Nothing, she claimed. Instead she had much to give me, to tell me, to teach me. In me she saw the potential and the power taken from her and my grandfather.

His name was Guiseppi Menzini.

“There’s more, Lieutenant,” Callendar told her. “A lot more.”

“I need the name she’s using, a description—where she’s living.”

“He doesn’t list any of that, at least not that I’ve found. I haven’t gotten through it all, but I did searches. He refers to her as Gina or Grandmother. I’ve got that he started the journal because she told him Menzini kept journals, and he went on a hunt for them when she told him to. She said they were his legacy, and his gateway to power. And she knew his mother kept them.”

“She spun him a bunch of lies. Menzini’s the hero, and MacMillon, who gave her forgiveness and took another man’s kid for his, the villain. And she counted on sentiment and loyalty—her half-sister’s for her, to keep her things, her papers, to believe she’d died trying to save the kid. Bitch. Peabody, get Baxter and Trueheart to the St. Regis bar, with a picture of Callaway. Maybe somebody remembers who he sat with on the date of the journal entry. It takes awhile to tell that story. Callendar, where else did they meet?”

“Her place. He doesn’t say where it is. But he talks about her sending a limo to pick him up. Makes him feel like a BFD. The way he talked about it, driving along the river, the views from her place—totally fancied-out—it sounds Upper East Side. Doorman, big lobby, private elevator. So a condo. Oh, and he liked that she had droids—no live help.”

“So she’s got money, or access to it. She sought him out. She’s got an agenda. She made him important, exactly what he wanted. She knew that. She knew which notes to play.”

“She’s been studying him,” Teasdale put in.

“It’s why the banking for the drugs, the equipment didn’t show on his financials. She’s fronting all that. She may have gotten the makings for him, may have sources there Strong couldn’t find. Out of the country, or deep down—some of her old contacts from Red Horse.”

“Why, after all these years?”

“Menzini died a few months ago, right? Maybe that was her trigger. I’ll ask her when I find her. She coached him, taught him. She lit the match.” As she calculated, Eve’s eyes narrowed, flattened. “He’s sitting down there now figuring out the best way to contact her. He’s got to figure his rich grandmother will buy him top lawyers, get him off. He’ll be thinking that.”

“But she won’t,” Teasdale said.

“No, hell no. He’s caught. No more use to her. Did Menzini’s death start this?” Eve wondered. “Is this some kind of revenge on her part? Or maybe a tribute. Fuck it.” She pushed her hands through her hair.

“We did an aging program,” Feeney told her. “We’ve got what she should look like now, but—”

“She’d have changed her face,” Eve finished. “A long time ago.

She faked her own death, she can’t keep the same face. She’ll have heard we’ve got him. Will she worry he’ll give her up?”

“Why didn’t he?” Teasdale demanded, and for the first time since Eve met her, the agent looked mildly distressed. “It would have given him a bargaining chip.”

“He’s smart enough to know that, and to keep that chip in his pocket. If she doesn’t come through for him, buy his way out, he’ll roll on her.”

“She’ll poof. Not your fault,” McNab said to Callendar. “Just bad luck. But she’s got the money and resources,